11 comments:

I love how you focus on an issue with photos! And I often wonder, what next? I am visiting my mother who is 94, who sits in a chair in a room of aging books and wonders at our gadgets and is mildly terrified of the Ipad on which I show her images of grandchildren.

Take it away! she says and then points to a photo album. I like pages, she adds. I like to think of my life in pages.

Maybe it's that the story hasn't yet begun... or maybe it's that the story is all over.

Either way, lovely.

I'm with mother.

P.S. On the blank page that passes for one's mind, the curiously useful and wonderfully under-used word "banausic" has been attempting to print itself for about fifteen years now. Its moment has finally arrived.

(Vassilis will know what it means, it comes from his linguistic ancestry. Utilitarian, mechanical and pragmatic definitions of life and its processes will never be anything but forgeries.)

I don't believe I ever really understood the nature of plastic until once, in a setting of discontented office journalists, a sort of game was devised, in which little plastic animals were set fire to.

It was a stupid game and the players all lost.

My view of the ATM/plastic card game is pretty much the same, but again, as with vaginas, how would I really know, I've never had any of those things.

But whether in Riga, Hong Kong, Palestine or the Marie Curie Cancer Care outlet store, as far as I'm concerned the plastic card machines could all be blown up tomorrow and the world would be none the worse for it.

Vaginas on the other hand probably ought to be left to their own devices, strictly none of our business. We've got problems enough of our own.

Here’s a hastily translated entry for the etymology of βάναυσος: The initial meaning of the word was “technician, someone who makes things with his hands ,” while equally ancient was its pejorative meaning of “boorish, uncouth, rude, crude, coarse” which was due to the negative opinion held by the ancient Athenians towards all those occupations done by hand, since they believed them to be incompatible with the doings of free men.

Source: Dictionary of the Modern Greek Language, Georgios Babiniotis.

Though not as well-wrought as yours, here’s one of my takes on the blank page:

Such a strange array of photos to show just how much "The world is too much with us/ getting and spending" -- Riga, Vilnius, Utrecht, Bangkok, Belfast, Hong Kong, Riyadh, London, Ramallah, Omagh, Everyman's wallet --